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Academic literacy offers power and social identity to student so students who lack this can feel very discouraged. Students who struggle with literacy can feel shame and embarrassment. A lack of academic literacy can make student feel insecure and isolated if it is not handled right. Social identity, power and academic literacy are very closely related.

If a student’s identity is different than their academic literacy they can feel badly about being a part of that social group or feel like it would cause tension to enter into this academic literacy. Sometimes students find it easier to shy away instead of pressing through what can oftentimes be hard. During my Linguistic Dimension study, I noticed that students who were struggling with English did not feel as much power and struggled to find their identity unless they were with their peers and could start speaking Spanish again fluidly. It was uncomfortable for them to switch to English after going through the security at the high school. They have spoken to me about the tension they feel being a part of different cultures at home and school and I think we need to do our best at school to be sensitive to this.

A different example of this is in my point of tension when I wrote: “She stopped encouraging us to work on our language but instead told us that some people just have an accent and others will never be able to speak fluently. I was jealous of all the people who it seemed to come naturally too. As I look back now I cannot believe that she gave up on us in this way.” My teacher had stopped caring for us as students and it had left me feeling powerless and embarrassed because she had decided I wasn’t good enough to pursue speaking a different language.

After reading the article on NPR for my Language in Life post is was also obvious that language offers us power and social connection, which is why academic literacy is so important. A women was able to find her voice in a hard place through sharing her poetry. This was made possible through her academic literacy.

Literacy is powerful and can be the key to giving students confidence and social identity. We can be careful as educators to help students find their social identity in academic literacies by helping them bring all their literacies together and showing them that this is how they are who they are.